Office hours:

• Howard's Office Hours Tuesdays 4-5 in 314 South Hall  (510)643-7365 & by appt.
• Anne's Office Hours Tuesdays 10-noon in 212 GSE&IS  (310)206-4687 & by appt.

About the students:

• UCB students
• UCLA st udents

Description

This course will explore important issues around the use of visual materials (such as moving image film, photographs, drawings, maps, etc.) in cultural heritage institutions such as museums, archives, and libraries.  The course will deal with special issues posed by visual materials in terms of representation, selection, evaluation, organization, access, file format, repurposing, longevity, intellectual property, etc.

The first part of the Berkeley semester will cover background material and will be pragmatically oriented.  Beginning in April for six weeks, the course will be co-taught as a distance-learning course with the advanced seminar in archival science at UCLA taught by Anne Gilliland-Swetland.  At that point the course will focus on in-depth examination and evaluation of the theory base, social and cultural contexts, and political issues associated with the conceptualization, evaluation, role, and management of historical and contemporary visual materials in cultural heritage institutions such as archives, museums, and libraries. The final 4 weeks of the UCLA Spring quarter will be spent in preparing and discussing student seminar papers relating to the topics covered by the course.

Topics to be covered include:

• What are the issues involved in making visual materials persist over time? How do we decide which materials should persist over time?
• How do intellectual property issues affect preservation, access, and use of visual materials ? (e.g., the implications of the millenium copyright bill?)
• As the digital world moves toward multiple uses and viewing works from different angles, how does this affect notions of context and its preservation?
• What challenges do visual materials pose for representation (e.g., cataloging, description) in terms of facets described, collection vs. item-level, provenance vs. subject-based access, and controlled vs. uncontrolled vocabularies?
• How do digital objects challenge traditional archival notions of evidence?  Can ways be found to authenticate digital works, and track provenance and versioning?
• How do reformatting and multiple formats of the same work change how we look at a work? (e.g., are videos the same as films? Are digital photographs the same as analog photos?)
• Is there a social context to viewing an object? (is viewing a video at home the same as viewing a film in a theater? Is viewing a mural on a screen the same as viewing it in-situ?)
• Who attributes value to a work, and under what circumstances? How does one deal with the different values that different communities may have towards any particular set of works?
• Are there ethical considerations in format conversions (e.g., film colorization, pan-and-scan?)
• How do politics affect cultural heritage institutions as they strive to serve new audiences? (the Enola Gay incident?)

Joint course materials

• Berkeley Course Description
• Additional UCLA Course Requirements
• Student P apers, Individual Projects, and Final Projects from Critical Theory groups from Howard's Impact class
• Course readings (don't worry, you don't have to read all these)
• Important sites
• Distance Learning articles/resources
• California Heritage Collection
• the Website for the Electronic Café International and our own  Ecafe project
• Completed or in-progress coursework
• Observations from California Heritage Collection
• Berkeley students' final projects
• Potential topics to be covered

Week-by-week summary of topics covered prior to 4/6

More Recent Topics

• 4/6--Preservation issues for traditional visual formats.  Conscious and unconscious preservation management.  How community values, societal pressures, and market imperatives affect preservation.  How evidence comes to remain and how much does posterity need?
• Summary of what the Berkeley class has covered prior to the joining of the two classes
• Class logistics, getting acquainted, using the distance learning facilities
• Talk on digital longevity
• Discussion on digital longevity (Powerpoint slides from Howard's talk)
• Assignment due: read Time & Bits, particularly Defining the Problem of our Vanished Memory
• UCLA students: email a brief personal profile to your respective instructor explaining why you're taking this course, your background, etc.  Also, if you have a digital image of yourself, send that as well.  These will be mounted on a class Website and used to help the remote students to put a fact to your voice.
• Questions to think about as you read:: Which communities think what needs to survive?
• 4/13--Preservation issues for digital visual formats, both native and reformatted.  Issues of digital longevity.  New techniques ? emulation, container architectures (e.g., bundling, bonding) Digital Rosetta Stones, etc..  Preservation of evidence vs. information.  Preservation of the artifact or the essence?  Version control.

Presentation by Anne: The Nature and Preservation of Evidence in Multimedia Cultural Materials (Powerpoint slides)
Suggested readings:
• NSF Workshop on Data Archiving and Information Preservation
• WGBH Educational Foundation Universal Preservation Format
• Hedstrom, Margaret and Sheon Montgomery. Digital Pre servation Needs and Requirements in RLG Member Institutions, 1998.
• Arts and Humanities Data Service, Strategic Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections, July 1998
• Rothenberg, Jeff. Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation, Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, January 1999
• National Standards Organization Invitational Meeting on Technical Metadata Elements for Image Files, April 18-19, 1999, Washington DC (sponsored by the National Information Standards Organization and the Digital Library Federation)
• Howard's Digital Longevity page
• "Don't I Already Have that Image?" Issues in Equivalency of Digital Images, draft paper on varient forms by Howard Besser and Jon Weise

Questions to think about as you read:
• What do the terms "evidence" and "information" mean with reference to cultural objects?
• How does evidential value manifest itself in visual and other multimedia materials?
• Does this evidential value change when materials are reformatted?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of keeping different versions of materials?
• What is different between the preservation needs of material that is "born digital" and that which has been digitized?
• Is it possible to preserve digital materials unchanged?
• What are the strengths and limitations of the various proposed methods of digital preservation for different uses of cultural materials?
• Assignment due (UCLA students): Submit an abstract of a seminar paper topic to Anne.
• 4/20--
• Report on National Standards Organization Invitational Meeting on Technical Metadata Elements for Image Files (Howard)
• Howard's meeting presentation
• summary of meeting results
• Questions to think about
• Should metadata always be somehow bound to a digital image, or should it exist externally?
• How do migration strategies for digital objects pose problems for guaranteeing veracity or authticity?
• How can we express the differences between the members of an "Image Family"?  How can we distinguish between variant forms of a work, particularly when different file formats (TIFF, JFIF/JPEG) can be transformed into identical displays but their metadata cannot?  What kinds of implications does this raise for long-term custodialship?
• UCLA students report on seminar paper topics/both classes comment on topics (Anne)
• Some possible resources:
• Ethically Questionable Uses of Images
• Propaganda Wars: Pictures Can Lie, After All by Felicity Barringer, NY Times Sunday Week in Review, April 25, 1999
• Individual Papers, individual projects, and group projects as part of Howard's Fall 1995 Image Database Class at University of Michigan
• Assignments due:
• look over Preserving Digital Information: Final Report and Recommendations, 1996 CPA/RLG Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information
• look over the plans for the National Standards Organization Invitational Meeting on Technical Metadata Elements for Image Files, April 18-19, 1999, Washington DC (sponsored by the National Information Standards Organization and the Digital Library Federation)
• 4/27--Issues of representation.  What are different professional descriptive paradigms?  What works and does not work with visual materials, and when?  Which communities need materials described in which ways?  How does description serve the "physical and moral defence of the materials," i.e., support authentication, collectivity, custodial, and preservation ends as well as access?  How might this differ across archival, museum, and library communities?
• Presentation on appraising and representing visual materials for archival collections and selecting them for digitization (Anne)

Suggested readings:
• Ostrow, Stephen E. Digitizing Historical Pictorial Collections for the Internet (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998)
• Hazen, Dan, Jeffrey Horrell, and Jan Merril-Oldham. Selecting Research Collections for Digitization(Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998)
• Questions to think about as you read:
• How would you pro-actively seek to document an event or process? How would your perspective on that event or process affect its representation (and consequently affect what remained for others to view in the future)?
• Think about how you might document this class, and how your choices would affect how the class is represented. Would you save the syllabus? (Which version? it's constantly changing.) Assignments? Student papers? Audio recordings of the class discussions? Still images of the class set-up? Videos of the course? How could you try to create an "adequate" representation, and how would this depend upon what you thought the class was about (the UCB class focus, the UCLA class focus, distance learning, etc.).
• Assignment due
• read We Can Make Van Gogh 3-D! Should We?, Mathew Mirapaul, NY Times, April 1, 1999
• (UCB students): Give an oral summary of all our discussions this term on the issue of "representation" for the UCLA students.
• 5/4--UCB student project presentations and class discussion
• Assignment due
• (UCLA students): Submit a seminar paper outline, including the introductory section to Anne.
• Interesting articles on cinema:
• A Digital Cinema of the Mind? Could Be, by Walter Murch, NY Times, May 2, 1999
• Storytellers Vs. Toy Sellers: We All Lose, by Janet Maslin, NY Times, May 2, 1999
• 'The Matrix': If the Cityscape Is Only a Dream by Herbert Muschamp, NY Times, May 2, 1999
• Planet Hollywood Indeed, Colonized, Dave Kerr, NY Times, May 2, 1999
• Black Films: The Studios Have It All Wrong, Spike Lee, May 2, 1999
• 5/11 - 6/1 -- UCLA students' seminar paper topic presentations. Each week 2-3 students will make presentations and lead class discussions based on their seminar paper topic. At least one week in advance, students will supply the other students in the class, as well as the instructor, with 2 readings that are central to their paper topic; as well as a set of questions the students should be considering as they read. These readings, together with the questions, will be used to focus discussion around the presentorÕs paper topic. Students are also expected to provide critical feedback to the presentor on his/her topic and work to date.
• Assignment due (UCLA students): Written critique (in HTML) of Berkeley student projects.
• 6/8 --

UCLA students' seminar paper due to Anne.

• Berkeley:  Wed 7-9 PM Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium
• Berkeley:  Tues 4:00-5:30 Human-Centered Computing Seminar
• Berkeley Past Events
• If you want to get class announcements, subscribe to the is246 class mailing list

main course page is at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/impact/s99/
extra course page is at http://scow.gslis.ucla.edu/faculty/swetland/HTML/vmsyll.html